Is Santa Really Odin?

The story as it is told

At Yule, the story goes, the winter sky belonged to Odin. The old Norse god rode across it on Sleipnir, his horse with eight legs. Children knew he was coming. They filled their boots with straw or carrots for Sleipnir, and in the morning Odin had left gifts in return.

Then Christianity arrived, and the god did not disappear. He changed his clothes. Odin's ride became St. Nicholas's. The boots by the hearth became stockings. And Sleipnir's eight legs became eight reindeer. Look at the long white beard, the retellings say, and the hooded cloak. Santa Claus is Odin in disguise.

What we can confirm

The reindeer are American and recent. The earliest known Santa-with-reindeer is a small illustrated booklet, The Children's Friend. Number III. A New-Year's Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve, published in New York by William B. Gilley in 1821. It opens: "Old SANTECLAUS with much delight / His reindeer drives this frosty night." The picture and the verse give him a single reindeer. Researcher Scott Norsworthy notes that copies survive at the American Antiquarian Society and Yale's Beinecke Library. The first plate of the Beinecke copy (viewed via its Commons reproduction) shows Santeclaus in a fur cap and red coat, driving a sleigh marked "REWARDS" across a rooftop behind a single reindeer. Yale's catalogue credits the hand-coloured lithographs to William Armand Barnet and Isaac Doolittle and the illustrations to Arthur J. Stansbury.

Two years later, on Dec 23, 1823, the Troy Sentinel in Troy, New York, printed an anonymous poem titled "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas." It gives St. Nicholas "a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer," and names them, ending with "Dunder and Blixem" (Dutch-style words for thunder and lightning). Clement Clarke Moore claimed the poem in 1844 and printed it in his Poems (New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1844), pp. 124 to 127, where the scan reads "eight tiny rein-deer" and the last pair has become "Blitzen". Whether Moore or Henry Livingston Jr. wrote it is.

So the count of eight first appears in a specific poem in 1823. It replaced a single reindeer from 1821, and nothing in either text points to Norse myth. The 1823 names come from a Dutch-New York frame (St. Nicholas, Dunder, Blixem), consistent with the Knickerbocker-era revival of St. Nicholas in New York.

What the Norse sources actually say. Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (about 1220s) does describe Odin's horse with eight legs. In Rasmus B. Anderson's 19th-century translation: "Sleipner is the best one; he belongs to Odin, and he has eight feet." Snorri's Heimskringla says King Hakon the Good (10th century) "made a law that the festival of Yule should begin at the same time as Christian people held it," and that before him Yule began on "the night of mid-winter" and lasted three days. The Swedish History Museum notes that Odin is called Jólnir in some sources, which suggests a role in pre-Christian Yule.

None of these texts has Odin delivering gifts to children, entering homes through chimneys, or children leaving straw for Sleipnir. The boot-and-straw detail is usually traced to modern writing on Dutch and German folk custom (the usual citation is Phyllis Siefker's 1997 book, which we have not been able to check) rather than to any medieval Norse text.

Expert verdict. The Swedish History Museum (Historiska museet, Stockholm) states it plainly: "Santa Claus, however, has nothing to do with Odin. His origins lie in the Dutch Sinterklaas tradition, derived from Saint Nicholas, which later spread to the USA and across the world." This matches the documentary trail above.

What a Norse specialist says. Jackson Crawford (PhD in Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison; formerly taught Norse at UCLA, UC Berkeley and the University of Colorado), as summarized by Asgard Alaska, calls the eight legs and eight reindeer a coincidence, since Santa's eight come from the 1823 poem. He adds that Odin wears blue, gray or spotted cloaks in the sources and that Odin's gifts go to warriors he wants in Valhalla, not to children. The one real link he accepts is Yule and Odin's name Jólnir. (This is a secondhand summary of his video; quote Crawford directly only after watching the video.)

The facts

• 1821: Gilley's The Children's Friend. Number III (New York) has "Old SANTECLAUS... His reindeer drives this frosty night"
• Dec 23, 1823: Troy Sentinel prints "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" anonymously, with "eight tiny rein-deer" and "Dunder and Blixem". LoC's record of the ca. 1830 Troy broadside also says the poem was "first published in the Troy Sentinal [sic] on Dec. 23, 1823"
• 1844: Moore's Poems (Bartlett & Welford), pp. 124 to 127, prints "A Visit from St. Nicholas" with "eight tiny rein-deer" and "Blitzen"
• Prose Edda: Sleipnir "belongs to Odin, and he has eight feet" (Anderson translation)
• Swedish History Museum: Odin is called Jólnir in some sources; "Santa Claus, however, has nothing to do with Odin"

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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